In preparation, I wanted to buy a lighter. I don't smoke, but it's good form to have one if you go to a bar. Plus, instant fire!

Foolishly sizing this up as a simple task, I drove to the closest convenience store. After waiting in line for ten minutes, I reached the counter, behind which stood a register clerk with hair that looked like it was trying to escape in every direction from a sinking ship. She asked "Can I help you?" with a tilted head and a grimace, as if she expected me to demand she load 40 bags of ice into my car – and hell, why not toss in her gall bladder, too, while she was at it?

I merely asked for a lighter. She inquired which particular one I wanted, to which I replied, “It doesn’t matter, any of them.” This, of course, was far too complicated a sentence for her handle, so she completely ignored it.

“Which box?” she asked, pointing at three different collections of lighters behind the counter.

“That one,” I said, not caring which she happened to be pointing at, “any of those is fine.”

“Which color?”

Knowing full-well the repercussions of repeating that it didn’t matter, I told her to give me a gray one. You’d think at this point I’d pay and that would be the end of it. Not so, in California.

“I need some ID please.”

Slightly amused, I handed over my Connecticut license. It had a hole punched in it because I was waiting for my California license to arrive in the mail. I also had a temporary CA license which was just a printed half-sheet of paper. She wouldn’t accept my CT license because of the hole. I presented her with the temporary CA license. She told me she needed a picture ID. I pointed to the picture on the CT license. She reiterated that she needed to see a picture ID and that this was no good.

Resisting the urge to end my life by pulling the large slurpy machine over on myself, I calmly explained the validity of my IDs:

A) I have a valid picture license (yes, it does have a hole in it, but it didn’t at one point in time. Punching a hole in it didn’t make me any younger).

B) I have a valid CA license, albeit a temporary one. With it, the state of California allows me to drive my 3326 pound vehicle with a loaded fuel tank holding 14 gallons of gasoline at speeds legally up to 65 miles per hour. Were I to collide with something solid at this speed (like, say, a 24-hour convenience store of some sort), I might create the very fire I sought after. The state trusts my driving ability -- but there’s doubt as to whether I could handle the great responsibility of an intricate flame-producing mechanism.

And here’s the best part: the car this piece of paper allows me to operate actually has a built-in lighter.

Unfortunately, all reasoning was lost on her. Sometimes you have to know when to move on. So I went to a pharmacy and showed the clerk my license. We had a nice chat about the weather, then I paid for a lighter and left.

This is my cactus. My wife picked it up at Home Depot and gave it to me for Valentine’s day, pointing out how I like strange and exotic things. I had never seen a cactus with such a bloom, and I loved it.

As I was watering it the other day, I noticed how crisp the flower felt. I took this as a bad sign, and gave it an extra drink. But then I noticed something unusual where the flower was sprouting from the greenery…

The Amazon Kindle has done so much, but it has only realized a small portion of its massive potential for interaction.

I’m a designer by profession, and I’d like to tell you how I would design a better Kindle experience for authors.

Sometimes, you don’t want feedback. You want to write for yourself, and yourself only, because you have a story trapped within you inhabiting a portion of your soul and you won’t be a complete person until you can expel it onto paper. Writing it down is cathartic, and anyone who has anything to say about it can go to hell, unless they see its genius.

On the other hand, often you write not only for yourself, but for your readers. Or you write solelyfor them, especially after you grow a loyal following. You want to tell the story that they want to read, the one that will surprise and delight them, and make them swear at you between chapters when you leave them hanging with an event that couldn’t possibly have just happened (oh, but it did – you made sure of that!).

Part of writing for your readers is having a dialog with them so you can improve your craft. It shouldn’t be a one-way street. Blogs are great for this, but you’re not capturing some of the most valuable feedback: feedback about how your readers are reading, and exactly how they’re reacting to your book as they read it.

Here are 5 ways the Amazon Kindle can give authors insight into how readers are experiencing their books:

See which pages have the most friction.Kindle could record the pages where readers put your book down (the reader turns the Kindle off or switches to a new book). And the longer it takes for the reader to return and move on, the higher the friction. Then authors could see what points in the book are giving readers the most trouble.

See where readers stop permanently.Likewise, Kindle could make note of the furthest each reader has reached in your book and provide data on these stopping points. Has 18% of your readership dropped your novel on that page where your main character denies the love of her life? Or do they quit in the middle of a long flashback you thought was great? That’s worth knowing about.

Let readers mark typos.No books are immune from typos. But now it should be fast and simple to eradicate them. Kindle should let readers mark a word or phrase as a typo, then provide the author with these segments. Then the author should be able to correct them on the spot and push those corrections seamlessly to readers without needing to republish the entire book or require the reader to go out of their way to download an update. It could be so easy! After a few weeks, your novel would be typo-free.

Let readers send the author notes about specific passages.If a reader highlights one of my passages, I want to know why. I’d love to peek inside their head at that moment. Why not let us enable a feature which allows readers to type a note to the author about passages they highlight and then have those sent to us by Amazon? And how amazing would it be to then be able to write back to the reader and have that show up with their highlighted passage under their comment? Of course, you’d want an option to not let the reader see your comment until after they’d finished your novel (so they don’t get wrapped up in what you say, and to encourage them to finish!).

See how many times people have read your book!Amazon: please show us a total tally, plus data on the most times it’s been read by single readers! Wouldn’t you love to know that 20K unique readers have read your novel a total of 23K times, with the top readers having re-read your book 6 times?

And as a bonus:

Author’s Commentary.Let us speak directly to our readers as they read. Let us add comments to our novel for our readership to enjoy if they decide to turn them on – exactly like a director’s commentary on films.

If I want to do any of this right now, I need to get a hard copy of one of my novels, give it to a reader, ask them to make notes in it and mark if & where they stop reading, and then take it back later on. Or I need to borrow their Kindle so I can download their notes file. This doesn't scale!

For my first post, I figured it would be elegant to write about great openings to stories. The best ones capture your entire attention, often in a single line. And those lines sometimes tell an entire story themselves.

Some accomplish greatness with an exquisite description and delivery of emotion that cradles the entire novel:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

- Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

Some catch your attention with juxtaposition of matter-of-fact statement with a shocking visual or a striking absurdity: